As CDs wane and streaming rules, vinyl once again fuels Boulder County's record stores

Area's 3 shops to celebrate Record Store Day on Saturday

He may be fuzzy on the exact date, but Andy Schneidkraut — owner of Boulder's Albums on the Hill — can't forget that night in 1994.

Hundreds of fans poured down the stairs into his basement-level shop, eager to snatch up brand-new CDs released at midnight by hometown heroes Big Head Todd & The Monsters and the about-to-explode Dave Matthews Band.

"That night, I sold more CDs than I sell now in six months," says a wistful Schneidkraut, presiding over his empty record store on a recent afternoon.

Music retail in Boulder County is now nearly unrecognizable from that 1990s heyday, a CD-fueled bonanza that peaked when — by Schneidkraut's count — there were 18 different record stores operating in Boulder alone.

Andy Schneidkraut, owner of Albums on the Hill, works behind the counter in his store on 13th Street in Boulder on Tuesday. "Record stores are still done — but they're done maybe more because of the retail apocalypse," he said about his profession's future. (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

Digital streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music now rule the consumer market, and the compact disc's death knell is growing louder. But it's vinyl — which never quite made it to the dustbin of music-format history — that's helping sustain those remaining brick-and-mortar retailers.

As sales of new vinyl slowly tick upward in this decidedly digital era, record stores are once again exactly that: stores that primarily sell records.

"We are all about vinyl, always have been," says Gale Taylor, owner of Longmont's Recycled Records LP, which just moved to bigger digs near Village at the Peaks. "Some people never lost interest. People think when they first notice something, that it's new. But it's not. Vinyl never left for a lot of people."

Boulder County's vinyl tap

Following the closure last month of Boulder's Absolute Vinyl, there remain just three dedicated record stores — shops that only sell music, focusing largely vinyl — left in Boulder County.

That's true; even in the CD's '90s golden age, many record stores still carried vinyl. But they're devoting much more real estate to it these days.

Patrick Selvage, manager of Bart's Record Shop in Boulder, says the store steadily has expanded its vinyl offerings — while shrinking its CD selection — to meet customer demand over the 2 ½ years he's worked there.

"There's something about the physicality of a store," Selvage says. "Even if they can buy a record on Amazon, they like coming in and flipping through the new releases because you never know what you might come across."

The celebration of vinyl as a viable, if still niche, format is never more evident than on Record Store Day, the annual promotion for independent shops that draws hordes of music lovers looking to buy specially pressed releases.

This year's event — with new vinyl titles expected from Pink Floyd, The National, Run the Jewels, The Cure and more — falls on Saturday.

All three Boulder County record stores are participating in what Schneidkraut says will be the busiest day of the year.

"It's like Christmas," says Selvage, who's opening Bart's at 7 a.m.

Taylor says she spent $10,000 on Record Store Day preorders, hoping big titles from the likes of David Bowie (including a previously unreleased live set from 1978) and the Grateful Dead (the vinyl premiere of a 1969 concert recording) will help bring customers old and new into Recycled Records.

"That's the stuff that'll sell here in Boulder County," she says of Bowie and the Dead. "I think people will be waiting outside the door."

Had physical media somehow managed to chase the digital genie back into its bottle? Was the existential threat looming over the music industry since the days of Napster suddenly beating a hasty retreat?

Total revenue from music-streaming platforms rose 43 percent in 2017 to $5.7 billion, while revenue from paid digital downloads fell 25 percent to $1.3 billion, according to the RIAA's 2017 figures.

On the physical side, shipments of CDs fell 6 percent in 2017 to $1.1 billion, while vinyl revenues rose 10 percent to $395 million. Overall, physical sales fell 4 percent to $1.5 billion — surpassing the total sales of digital downloads, but still only a fraction of the $7 billion in digital-music revenue last year.

Vinyl's upward trend, however, can mask how small of a niche it remains. Last year, labels shipped 15.6 million vinyl records — and more than five times as many CDs, a format that nearly every one agrees is dying.

Still, those vinyl platters, with their higher price points and hip cachet, have become a life preserver for music retailers who've withstood the digital tides.

"The uptick in vinyl is very, very small," says Steve Knopper, author of "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age" and a Denver-based contributing editor for Rolling Stone.

"It's not enough to bring everything back, but it does seem to be enough to float a record store or two in most major cities."

'Nothing is predictable'

Schneidkraut, who's owned Albums on the Hill for the 30 years, is less sanguine about the future of his chosen profession.

"Record stores are still done — but they're done maybe more because of the retail apocalypse," he says, referring to the steady stream of brick-and-mortar closures through the 2010s as spending habits change and shift online. "The death of Toys 'R' Us is the 2,000-pound gorilla in the coal mine."

Perched behind Albums' cluttered back counter, Schneidkraut recounts the history of his store, which he bought in 1987 just before CDs overtook vinyl as the medium of choice, exploding in popularity among the early adopter students on the nearby University of Colorado campus.

'It's like Christmas'

Each April, independent record stores across the United States — including all three in Boulder County — participate in Record Store Day. Labels press exclusive and limited-edition vinyl releases to be sold only at participating shops, and fans line up for hours for a chance to buy them. This year's Record Store Day is on Saturday, and the full list of releases and participating stores is available at recordstoreday.com.

Trouble began brewing in the late '90s, when big-box stores such as Best Buy — enabled by the major labels — undercut independent record stores by using CDs as loss leaders to get customers in door.

Then came the MP3.

"Napster was murder to the music business," Schneidkraut says of the peer-to-peer, file-sharing network that enabled global music piracy.

The industry fought off the digital surge through the early 2000s, largely in vain. Schneidkraut says the worst had passed by the early 2010s, and his store now subsists largely on new vinyl and what's left of the used-CD market.

"Whatever the challenges we faced, physical music was still a mass-market product," he says. "The big challenge now is that it's no longer a mass-market product; it's a niche. And the only real growth we're seeing is in new records. But they're a relatively high-ticket, but low-margin, product."

Selvage, too, makes note of how low the margins are on the new vinyl he orders to fill the racks at Bart's Record Shop, the latest incarnation of the Boulder institution. (Original owner Bart Stinchcomb sold the shop, for a second time, in 2016, this time to former Whole Foods executive Will Paradise.)

Labels no longer take returns on vinyl, so picking which of the roughly 50 new titles released each week — and how many copies of each — to stock is something of an educated gamble.

"Nothing is predictable," Selvage says between ringing up customers. "It's so crazy. It's so hard to tell what people are going to like. You've got to be dialed into your clientele — and still, you can never tell what you'll sell 20 of, or just one of."

'Intentional listening experience'

In Longmont's Recycled Records on a recent Saturday, Taylor — owner and sole proprietor of the 9-year-old store — wipes down record sleeves ("You don't want to sell dirty stuff") as shoppers browse bins of vinyl stacked on tall, well-organized shelving that runs the length of her new 2,400-square-foot space.

Taylor says she moved the shop out of downtown in February, after six years at Third and Main streets, to gain more room and be able to offer free parking. She's already seeing new faces, from young crate diggers to parents who bring their kids in looking for Broadway soundtracks.

Tale of the tape

Newly released 2017 sales figures from the Recording Industry Association of America show revenue from digital streaming and, to a lesser degree, vinyl sales continue to trend upward, while paid digital downloads and CD sales fall.

Digital streaming revenue: Up 43 percent to $5.7 billion

Digital download revenue: Down 25 percent to $1.3 billion

CD revenue: Down 6 percent to $1.1 billion

Vinyl revenue: Up 10 percent to $395 million

Total digital revenue: Up 22 percent to $7 billion

Total physical revenue: Down 4 percent to $1.5 billion

Source: RIAA

"I did not jump into this," she says, noting she was working in both counseling and real estate when she first began selling vinyl. "I tested the market: First at a flea market, then opened a store."

Never a CD collector herself, Taylor's always listened to music on vinyl, and she seems to appreciate the younger generation that's discovering the pleasures of analog sound, 12-inch artwork and actual liner notes.

"It really is social for them," she says. "I think it's that social part of records that kids are after — that and the artwork. They're so into the artwork."

That rediscovery of music as a physical artifact is what fuels Vinyl Me, Please, a curated record-of-the-month service with 30,000 subscribers that moved to Denver last year after several years being based in Boulder.

Matt Fiedler, the service's CEO and cofounder, speaks of vinyl as "an intentional listening experience" in a world where so much music is taken in passively, pulsing along in the background of some other activity.

"The local record store carries a lot of sentimental value for people," he says. "I think the value we add to that ecosystem is really introducing people to vinyl and bringing them into stores. ... The interest in getting more records is instilled in them."

Schneidkraut, too, speaks of the "deeper emotional connection" that he finds his vinyl customers seeking out, whether that's Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," or something a bit more mainstream.

"Every week, girls come in and buy Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours,'" he says. "I think people want to understand how when they ask their mom about that record, their mom's eyes glass over and all of a sudden they're in a different emotional environment."

'Not that much crazy left'

Hayley Sinn-Penfold stands among the bins at Boulder's Absolute Vinyl on the store's final day of business last month, having stopped in for one final flip through the shop's records — and to see owners Doug and Annie Gaddy.

"It's a bummer," she says. "I'm a regular here, and at the dump. Those are the two places I walk in and people know my name. It's like 'Cheers.'"

For music lovers, record stores are indeed communal places, gathering points for the like-minded and a place where discovery, and conversation, awaits. Streaming music may just be a click away, but for a certain strain of fan, there's just something to be said about holding that music in their hands.

"There's a very tactile element to record collecting," says Kurt Ohlen, promoter of the twice-annual Denver Record Collectors Expo. "Buying online is one thing, but you can't touch it, you can't hold it, you can't feel the heft."

Ohlen's most recent record expo, the event's 25th anniversary, drew a huge crowd last month to an overstuffed hotel ballroom in Northglenn, where dealers hawked old records and music fans of all ages browsed their bins.

"We were blown away," he says of the turnout.

Doug Gaddy, who says he closed Absolute Vinyl because he and Annie were ready for a change of pace, not because the business had grown untenable, used to sell records at shows like that for a living — and may do so again, having hung on to his store's stock of vinyl.

In the meantime, the shuttering of Absolute Vinyl leaves Boulder with just Bart's and Albums, and adds the Gaddys' store to the town's litany of fondly remembered, but long-defunct, record shops, including Trade-a-Tape, Rocky Mountain Records, Replays and Wax Trax.

Gaddy, reflecting on his career a few weeks before Absolute Vinyl's final bow, muses on what it takes to still be running a record store in 2018.

"You've got to be a certain kind of crazy to want to do it," he says. "And there's just not that much crazy left in Boulder."

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